Asotin County, Washington

Asotin County Library (Clarkston, WA) open data project

Problem

Critical local data lives in silos or corporate platforms. Communities can't see patterns, measure progress, or make informed decisions about their own future.

Solution

Asotin County Library, a three-branch junior taxing district serving about 22,300 people in Washington's southeastern corner, used a 2019 IMLS Accelerating Promising Practices grant ($49,912) to gather local government and library datasets, publish them on the state's data.wa.gov Socrata portal, and link them by topic from an open-data page on its own site; it reported 56 datasets published by 2023. A 2023 IMLS National Leadership planning grant ($146,575) funded two librarians, Jennifer Ashby and Mary Neuman, to test the process with six partner libraries and produce the Open Data Toolkit for Libraries, which WebJunction (OCLC) featured in October 2025.

Patterns used: Public Data Commons

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